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Because all the Cool Kids are doing it, and if you don't join them then you'll find all your friends have disappeared.
I've lately begun to realize that I don't actually need a phone for anything I do by myself. Sure, I sometimes need to provide a phone number for government forms, buying airplane tickets, etc. but that could easily be done through Google Voice or throwaway SMS receivers or something like that. I know my way around town well enough not to need map apps. If I want to listen to music I can use an MP3 player. Etc.
The only problem is social: the norm of making plans and sticking to them is long gone. If I make arrangements to meet someone at location X at time Y, about half the time I'll get a text message while en-route saying "Let's meet at location Z at time W instead". If I later complained that they didn't show up to X@Y as planned, they would accuse me of being unreasonable for not getting with the times and for deigning to leave home without an always-online communication device.
I got rid of Facebook years ago and never looked back, but I have been burned at least once, when I tried to go to an event at the time that had been conveyed to me by word-of-mouth but was later rescheduled via Facebook without my knowledge. Imagine my embarrassment when I was the only person who showed up at the original time!
When COVID began, I finally relented and signed up for Discord to stay in touch with my local friends. What else could I have done? Should I instead have been all alone through that time of crisis, because of my "weird insistence" that my social life should not be mediated by unfriendly third-parties?
Don't get me wrong; I know where you're coming from. But let's not delude ourselves that it's just a matter of our own individual choices. Resistance to the digitization of social life must take place collectively, or not at all.
The question is, would they still act that way if you didn't have (and they knew you didn't have) such a device? Certainly nobody in my life would. In my experience, the norm is that cell phones enable changing plans, but do not remove the requirement to stick to agreed-upon plans. If you propose a new time/place for a meeting and don't get a confirmation that the other party is OK with that, then you stick to the original agreed-upon plan (or you're a dick and nobody is going to associate with you).
I suspect that my amount of social activity would drop by about half if I tried to enforce this norm on my friends. I've had people no-show with no notice (text message or otherwise), and when I see them again later they seemingly have no memory of ever having made plans. Can I afford to cut all flaky people out of my life? It seems like a losing battle, but maybe I'll feel differently as I get older.
Yeah, to be blunt if I were you I wouldn't keep those people in my life. That sort of behavior just isn't acceptable, phones or no phones. Like, even if you have a phone, what if you don't see their message in time because you're driving to the meetup location? What if there's a technical glitch? What if they thought they sent a message but actually forgot to hit send? There are many sorts of reasons why one may not get a last minute change of plans like that, and in such cases the onus is on the other person to stick to the plan.
Flaky people have always existed. But I'm not personally convinced that the existence of phones has made it acceptable to be flaky when making social plans. Life happens, of course, and everyone is going to have times where they can't make it. But someone who does that regularly is being inconsiderate and is the one in the wrong, even by the standards of today (or at least as far as I've experienced them).
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